A Vicksburg, Miss., high school football coach has "the perfect family" - respected therapist wife, school football star son and theater enthusiast daughter. The daughter's drama queen best friend, Kendall, who has a huge crush on her brother, is less happy at home with his abusive, puritanical, fundamentalist mother. As football season and auditions for "Oklahoma" are getting under way, tragedy strikes.

Could it be a movie?

"Yes, it started out as a screenplay," says "Yellow" playwright Del Shores - best known for such Southern Gothic comedies as "Daddy's Dyin' (Who's Got the Will?)" and "Sordid Lives" (and the films and TV series he turned them into). "Then I quickly realized I could tell the entire story on one set and, suddenly, I had my next play. But I'm looking forward to adapting it (as a film). It feels like a studio picture to me."

"Most people know Del through his outrageous 'Sordid Lives' characters," says New Conservatory Theatre Center founder Ed Decker, who's directing "Yellow" and previously staged Shores' "Southern Baptist Sissies" for the company. "This play is told in a less flamboyant or eccentric manner. The comedy and drama unfold in a universal way, highlighting family, faith and the power of love."

Oddly, given Shores' LGBT themes - and TV audience - "Yellow" is only the third of his plays to be staged in the Bay Area. "Sissies" was the second.

"Marin Theatre Company was one of the first theaters to produce 'Daddy's Dyin' ' in the late '80s," he says. "It's now been produced over 3,000 times, my most-produced play. Shockingly, 'Sordid Lives,' which is gay, gay, gay, has never been done in San Francisco."